I don’t remember how it happened. Well, not exactly. I remember it was a sunny day though, the kind of perfect day you don’t soon forget. I was on a stroll though the dockside market. I had wanted to find an exotic ornament for my daughter. The afternoon sun danced across the sea and onto my skin, a light ocean breeze tempering its heat. Radiance. I walked in cadence with the sounds of the market, the calls of the gulls, and the clanking of my trailing guards’ armor, an unexpected, almost symphonic rhythm. I was smiling, not at anything in particular, just at the beauty of the moment.

Suddenly, the symphony died. All sound evaporated. I was deaf. My vision began to blur. I spun around to alert my guards, but they had disappeared. I tried to shout out, but I don’t know if I made a sound. My vision was all but gone. Blurs and flashes of black. The next step I took failed me. A shockwave shot ferociously though my frozen body as I hit the cobblestone. Total darkness. I was blind, deaf, paralyzed. I felt hands on me, hurried touches - civilians trying to help. Soon that was gone. Complete and total blackness. Then, out of the void, came a whisper, a whisper that echoed through the darkness. I don’t know if I was hallucinating, dreaming, or just dying, but I heard one final sound before the end. A child’s voice, a girl’s, not unlike my daughter’s. “Valar Morghulis.”

Circumstances surrounding my death are still a bit foggy. We do know there was involved several things: an unloaded gun, an old man and a 23-year-old South African chimpanzee named Raul. Raul was not a native of South Africa, rather, he was imported from a banker and sometimes safari hunter from Denmark who traveled with Raul whenever he knew his destination would supply a low variance of entertainment. Raul was, for lack of a better phrase, his dancing monkey. They traveled quite often in the banker's later years, and it was at this time that I somehow stumbled into the story of the banker and the monkey.

Had I known I would end up dead after my monkey rendezvous, I wouldn't have changed a thing. For upon first notice of the monkey, when his nibbly little eyes met mine, I hated him something awful. His half deranged smile made me feel incredibly uncomfortable. This monkey wasn't funny. This monkey was disturbed. The banker was disturbed as well. The way they yapped at each other was disturbed - he in danish, the monkey in gibberish.

It was a half rainy day; I darted through the drops unscathed, save for a nicely misted face. As I came upon the café, the sidewalk tables were empty but for one. Banker and monkey. When Raul jumped his chair and thrust his nasty fangs in my direction, I pulled my revolver and fired. The animal was down. I suppose I should've stopped there but I was really very annoyed. I aggressively loaded that monkey with the rest of the chambers and he was done.

The last thing I saw was a red hot flash from the banker's hand. I thought I had simply been shot in the shoulder but that Dane wasn't kidding around. Blood spilled into my eyes and I was gone. The last thing I saw was Raul's hairy face as I was coming down to meet it on the cobblestone ground.